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“Muchas Gracias, Senor Cantor!” ** Famous ambitious positioner Eric Cantor probably thought he’d hit a Solomonic sweet spot last year when he dramatically announced his support of immigration amnesty for “ the kids … those who were brought to this country as children.” The MSM would predictably love it — compassion from a Republican leader! Yet conservatives might not hate him — after all, he wasn’t endorsing a general amnesty of all 11 million undocumented immigrants.*** And who doesn’t like “kids”?

Little did Cantor know that this exquisitely calibrated stand would prove to be about the most embarrassing position he could take — when the “kids,” often unaccompanied, started surging across the southern border, causing a humanitarian and policy crisis just as he was facing a challenge in Tuesday’s Virginia primary. Even the New York Timescouldn’t help but notice that the young illegal migrants said they were motivated, not just by conditions back home in Central America, but also by the prospect that they’d qualify for Cantoresque amnesty. ”Central Americans, [said a Salvadoran immigration official] were left with the sense that the United States had ‘opened its doors’ to women and children.”